Autobiography books 2020

Talking about inciting anger—let’s move on to the second book on the 2020 shortlist of the best new memoirs. This is Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill. It charts his investigation into the allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein, for which he shared a Pulitzer Prize with two reporters at the New York Times.

I discussed the 2020 autobiography shortlist with Mark Athitakis recently, and he talked about how memoir has come to the fore, and that could be thought of as autobiography at a slant, as you say: pulling out a portion or theme from a life for close analysis. It’s interesting to hear that it’s also happening in biography in 2020.

Autobiographies are mainly written by famous persons. They teach us different stories, the authors’ struggles in life, the emotions they went through, making the autobiographers more human. Here are 15 of the best autobiographies in no qualitative order.

In adulthood, a job in New York sends her into freefall and White spares no detail as she recalls her unravelling. In Hungry (Mudlark), the restaurant critic Grace Dent tells of her early life in Carlisle, and her relationship with her father, who would cook her “sketty” – his name for spag bol – when she was a child.